Because of its support for a wide range of devices and power, Meshcentral is already an amazing platform for remote management and control of Internet-of-Things devices. Today, we added another feature that makes Meshcentral a true leader in IoT device management and control - full GPIO support. General Propose IO (GPIO) is a set of software controlled hardware pins that are placed on many boards. If you look at the Intel® Galileo, there is a connector full of GPIO pins that can be configured to be used as signal input, output, oscillator or for analog read. These pins allow both DIY hackers and professionals to use these boards for a wide range of usages. GPIO is the key to connecting Intel architecture to garage doors, motion detectors, lamps, light sensors and much more. With a little knowledge, you can use many Intel® Galileo boards as an internet connected home alarm system, home automation system, controlling holiday lights or industrial machinery.

In the latest version of Meshcentral and Mesh Agent v187, you can now click on the “GPIO” link at the bottom of a device page to see the current value of each GPIO pin and it’s setting. You can then change the settings and monitor and change the values in real time. This feature is offered on both Meshcentral.com and the local mesh agent web site on HTTPS port 16990. So, you can control GPIO over the Internet or without Internet connectivity using the local mesh agent web site. Both will do the same job. One of the difficulties with GPIO is that different boards have different features and capabilities. This problem has been solved by Matt Primrose and Matt Royer who have created a way to logically map pins to hardware capabilities. You don’t have to worry about the exact details of setting up and using each GPIO pin, we now have a built-in mapping file for each supported board making the complexity of GPIO vanish. Both Matt’s creates mappings to support Intel® Galileo, Intel® Galileo 2, Minnowboard, Minnowboard MAX and all versions of the Raspberri Pi. With this GPIO could not be easier, and that is not all… We also updated our HTML / Javascript samples so that any developer can quickly make use of Meshcentral’s web based support for GPIO. In a few minutes, you can build your own web site for controlling your devices.

Now, users can setup each pin, its name and color on the UI. Then focus on getting it hooked up to something cool! Matt Primrose has really great YouTube video demonstrations of GPIO on Meshcentral and how it can work for you:

Youtube: Overview of GPIO support on Meshcentral (3 minutes, 57 seconds)
Youtube: Matt answers frequently asked questions about GPIO and Mesh (5 minutes, 30 seconds)

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Check out Matt Primrose live demonstration of GPIO on Intel® Galileo.
On the first video, Matt goes over a quick overview. On the second, he answers many common questions.

Meshcentral now supports General Purpose IO (GPIO) on a wide array of devices.
You can configure, monitor and control IO pins on from a local device web site or from Meshcentral.com.

Meshcentral continues to lead the way in cloud based security usages. Thanks to work from Jacob Gauthier, Meshcentral can now securely boot a trusted Linux operating system using Intel® AMT IDE-R and perform a AV scan of all attached disks on a remote system over the cloud. That is right, we now extended the Intel AMT IDE redirect feature of Meshcentral so that you could use it to trigger a trusted remote AV scan. Why is this interesting?

In most cases, anti-virus software run on the same operating system that is the target of viruses and malware. A better way to go is to boot a separate trusted operating system that would then scan the drives. The operating system would have to be sent over a trusted channel and use a set of tools that are downloaded and integrity checked. Today, we are announcing that we did just that. We use Intel AMT IDE Redirect feature as a way to remotely boot a trusted operating system, we then download ClamAV an open source anti-virus software that then automatically runs on all attached drives. This new feature builds on top of the Meshcentral cloud IDE-R support we announced a few weeks ago. The trusted Linux operating system is built on-the-fly into a single use ISO image that is then sent over the cloud to the target machine. Intel AMT is required to make all this work.

Jacob Gauthier built an innovative “package stuffing” system. Once the basic recovery OS is running, we want to try to limit IDE-R data transfer to boost boot speed. The recovery OS will check local disk storage or HTTP or IDE-R to get required application packages. The recovery OS checks the package hashes and pushes packages into local storage for future use. As a result, you always get the fastest possible boot speed over the cloud with the remote computer locally caching much of the data.

Check out our video demonstration and talk on this new feature:

    Youtube: Overview of Meshcentral support for IDE-R (6 minutes)

With this release, Meshcentral continues blaze the path forward for innovative security usages. With just a few clicks, administrators can remotely run fully secure AV scans on machines. Intel AMT IDE-R session works over CIRA or agent relay making it easier than ever to perform an out-of-band AV scan over the cloud.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

In this YouTube video, Jacob Gauthier and myself demonstrate and talk about
Meshcentral Intel® AMT IDE-R feature and the new package stuffing system for accelerated boot.

Performing a trusted AV scan on a remote machine over the cloud has never been easier. With just a few
clicks you can remotely boot and launch a the scan using a fully verified trusted recovery OS.

Meshcentral uses an innovative “package stuffing” system to keep the IDE-R session fast.
Usage packages like anti-virus and others are pulled from local disk, HTTP or IDER-R and hash checked.
If downloaded & validated, they are pushed back into local storage for future use.

In the past months we have made huge improvements in making Meshcentral work for computer management and especially Internet-of-Things usages. I am very happy to relase the Mesh Agent v1.88 with improved local management on HTTPS port 16990. While many people know about Meshcentral.com, they don’t often know that the mesh agent itself hosts a small web site on port 16990 that can be used to login and remotely manage the device without cloud management. This local web site already offered remote desktop, remote terminal and GPIO control. Today we are announcing improvements to all of these and the addition to remote file management. Basically, it’s like having secure a web based file transfer tool build into all mesh devices.

The new file management tab allows you to navigate drives, create folders, rename and delete files. But the best is the new WebRTC upload / download feature. Users can now hit a button or drag & drop files into the page and have them uploaded to the remote device. You can also click a file or select many files and hit download to perform batch downloads. For internet-of-things devices like Intel Galileo boards, managing and transferring files into the device has never been easier. Once setup, point a browser to HTTPS:16990 and login. Works on any platform, you just need a WebRTC browser like Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

Some people will notice that we are doing all this while keeping the mesh agent very small and the local web site is blazing fast even when served from IoT devices. This is all because of Bryan Roe’s amazing Web Site Compiler. This most excellent tool takes a development web site and performs a series of steps that results in a single C header file with a set of highly optimized web sites. All you need to do is #define the web site you want to use at compile time. What’s great is the at site is actually a single compressed file that is served to the browser in compressed form. The mesh agent’s 289k web site is packed into a 30k block that is embedded inside the agent’s source code.

Check out our video demonstration and talk on this new feature:

    Youtube: Meshcentral.com - Mesh Agent site and Web Site Compiler (6 minutes, 52 seconds)

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

A demonstration of the new Mesh Agent site with File management and
a chat with Bryan Roe who authored the new web site compiler tool.
- Click here to watch video -

All new WebRTC based file management on the Mesh Agent local web site.
It’s like having a file management tool built into every mesh device.

The Web Site Compiler is the secret trick that makes the Mesh Agent’s local management so
amazing small and fast. All the steps for each build is all done in one click, takes less than 1 second.
The original site is developer with conditional markers for inclusion in select devices.

This year, I am once again honored to be a speaker at the Intel Developer Forum 2014 in San Francisco. I arrived today for the setup and rehearsals and took the time to record two video blogs. I got no less then four things going on this year. If you are attending and see me at the session, workshop or anywhere, please say hi. Especially if you are a user of Meshcentral, I want to hear from you. Ok, so my four things:

• I am giving a workshop on running Meshcentral on Intel Galileo devices tomorrow, Tuesday September 9th 2014 in room 2011. We will cover the basics of Meshcentral, getting Intel Galileo setup, controlling the device over the internet, software development and getting your own server setup.
• I am giving session RPCS007 on Wednesday September 10th in Room 2002. This will cover Meshcentral and how it makes use of Intel vPro features such at Intel AMT and Intel IPT-PKI.
• I will sometimes be on the 3rd floor in the Ultimate Maker Space at table 27 to talk about Meshcentral and showing of the Intel Galileo Tower. No less then 40 Intel Galileo device all assembled into a single big tower with the help of 3D printed parts. Certainly a great picture.
• I am also giving away the book "Active Platform Management Demystified" in the Technology Showcase at the Intel Business Client Pavilion. Of you get a book and see me, ask me to sign it!

This should be a lots of fun this year at IDF. You will notice a lot of focus on Internet-of-Things and Meshcentral will a big part of this. Check out my two videos blogs below. The top of on the upcoming IoT workshop and the second of the Intel Galileo Tower.

Ylian
meshcentral.com

Hi everyone! Another update from IDF 2014. Lots of things going on: Giving away books in the Technology Showcase area, did my first workshop on connecting Intel Galileo devices to the Internet using Meshcentral.com and met lots of people at the Ultimate Maker Space on the 3rd floor near the Intel Galileo Tower (40 Intel Galileo in a 3D printed tower). Tomorrow I am going a session in room 2002 at 2:30pm on Meshcentral and Intel vPro. That will be a lot of fun. Below, I had someone record a video of a very short version of my workshop on Intel Galileo. Enjoy and see you guys tomorrow!

Ylian
meshcentral.com

I am very happy to announce for the first time, Meshcentral support for Intel® Edison! Only a few days after getting our first Intel® Edison device in our lab, we got it working! Meshcentral already supports on a bunch of Internet-of-things devices, but we could not wait to get our hands on the amazingly tiny Intel® Edison and turn it into a cloud managed device. As of a few hours ago, Meshcentral has a new selection for Intel® Edison installation and like other devices, you just copy/paste/run the install script as root on the Edison. It will take about a minute for certificate creation to complete and the device will connect back to Meshcentral for secure remote management.

The Mesh Agent for Intel® Edison comes with remote terminal and file access. It has the built-in local management page on HTTPS port 16990 and come with our amazing tiny WebRTC data stack for direct Browser-to-Edison communication over the Internet. This is only some of the piles of features packed in the tiny Intel® Edison Mesh agent.

If You have an Intel® Edison, please try it and give us feedback so we can improve the solution.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

The Meshcentral team pictured with our Intel® Edison device.
(We only have one, so we are taking good care of it!)

Meshcentral supports an impressive set of IoT devices. Is there one we don’t support?
Meshcentral makes all these devices manageable over the Internet.

Installing on an Intel® Edison is just as simple as any other device, just copy and run the install script as root. The device will take a minute to generate certificates and connect back to Meshcentral.

Over the last 5 years Meshcentral.com has been online and the number of users has grown significantly. Today, there is over 14000 user accounts, over 15000 nodes (over 4400 of them have Intel® AMT) in over 11000 meshes. The mesh server is handing the load very well with almost 7000 machines connected at peak hour and the server’s CPU staying at about 1% utilization. This is still very light load for any server, but Meshcentral.com is also a test bed for real world usage of Mesh technology and with these users we can see where we can improve the server’s scalability and performance.

A week back we released a high performance Mesh server update that is intended to improve the scalability of the server. The update cuts the number of database queries by about 10%, drops the time the database spends answering the queries by 70% and cuts the number of database table writes by 80%! As a result of this update, mesh server administrators should see a significant performance improvement on Mesh servers that are under heavy load.

We also work to leverage WebRTC as much as possible to reduce traffic going thru the server and accelerating user responsiveness. The result is a scalable server that can be at the center for powerful cloud management solutions. From Servers to PC’s to IoT devices, Meshcentral has the scale, power and features to deal with all of it.

For more details on the performance update, we have a YouTube video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRefYsoL_5o

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Check out the YouTube video on the Mesh Server performance patch.

This is just some of server performance data we got after the update.
Reduction of request complexity and number of writes is even more significant.

Meshcentral already supports activate-active load-balancers. Below is a sample
configuration of how Meshcentral can be server on a server cluster.

The mesh team has been hard at work and this week it’s Rick Edgecombe’s turn to shine with his release of the latest Mesh Agent for Android on the Google Play store. The improvements touch many aspects of the Android agent and so, we will have to look at this in detail:

• Local video controls and touch/drag video. The new agent improves the “Mayday” video feature with added use controls. The video window that shows the support person can either be on top of all other windows and can’t be user controlled or not on top and user controllable. In this new version of the Mesh Agent for Android, the video window can be put in ether modes and switched on-the-fly allowing the window to be locked on top or fully controlled by the user. The user can also mute and hang-up the call directly from the video window.
• Two way WebRTC TURN & more robust connection logic. This new agent now support improved connection logic and fully supports TURN servers for phones that need WebRTC connections behind proxies. This improvement will make it so that in almost every situation, if the mesh server is correctly configured, the WebRTC connection will correctly establish.
• Local network Android management. You can now setup a username, password and activate the new local management feature on the local user interface. Once active, someone on the local network can access the Mesh Agent’s built-in web server on HTTPS port 16990, login and access remote files, terminal and remote desktop! This is perfect for remote debugging of the device. No server connection needed, everything is done within the local mesh agent.
• Remote desktop speed increase on Android Kitkat. Performing live screen capture on Android has always been very difficult to do. Involving many hacks, the performance of the display capture has always been an issue. Now, the new Mesh Agent support a completely new way to do screen capture with much higher performance for Android Kitkat devices and newer. This new feature gives the remove desktop feature a much better user experience and more interactive feel.

On a separate note, a new vulnerability has been discovered in SSLv3 that made headlines as “POODLE”. In addition, the OpenSSL team has just fixed critical bugs in DTLS which the Mesh Agent makes heavy use of for WebRTC. As a result, yesterday we released Mesh Agent v1.89 on all major platforms with OpenSSL 1.0.1j and SSLv3 compiled out. This fixes all known outstanding security issues and agents are automatically being updated. We also disabled SSLv3 on meshcentral.com and mesh.intel.com. So, we are on top of things. If you own a Mesh server and opted not to get automatic updates, please make sure to manually update to the latest Mesh Agents as soon as possible.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Rick Edgecombe is the owner of the Mesh Agent port for Android and ChromeOS. Our group provides
him with many Android device to use for testing. Given the agent’s low-level management hooks,
it must be tested on many devices and Android versions.

The Android Agent now has a built-in web site on HTTPS port 16990.
It can be configured using the local agent interface and accessed from the local network.

This week, we are taking Meshcentral for the first time into a completely new direction with the introduction of user-to-user text messaging. This allows users to establish relationships and send chat messages to each other. For many years now, Meshcentral has been focused on user-to-machine interactions where administrators could manage remote devices over the internet, now we added new server behavior for user-to-user permissions and messaging. We now have a full server web API for managing user-to-user relations. The mesh team then built a completely new web application to take advantage of this API. Users of Meshcentral.com and other mesh server administrators will start seeing our new messaging feature show up in many places.

• Users can login to Meshcentral.com and use the new “My Friends” tab. From there, you can invite others, accept invitations and do text messaging. This is the easiest way to get started.
• Our updated Mesh Web Application is at Meshcentral.com/m. Allows both user messaging and device management for cell phones and tablets.
• Our new Mesh Application for Windows allows users to stay logged into the mesh server with a system tray background application.

Now for some technical details. The new user-to-user API’s are available in our html samples package, this allows other developers to build applications that take advantage of all of the new user API’s and all of our existing device management API. The team also integrated WebRTC into the web messaging application so that, when possible, WebRTC is automatically connected in a messaging session and all messages flow directly user-to-user without the server acting as the relay. Having WebRTC setup allows us to move forward with other usages in the future. The Mesh Windows application is actually the web application packaged within Node-Webkit. This powerful Intel sponsored project allows us to have the web application run as a native Windows application with full system tray support. The node application is also fully self-upgrading, so we expect to use this feature heavily to we find and fix issues with the application or release new feature. We also fully support browser notifications so that toast messages will show up on the screen (outside the browser) when another user changes state or sent a message.

Since this is our first release of the user-to-user feature, we do expect some issues and encourage anyone using the Mesh Messaging feature to give us feedback. Two notable people for this release, Matt Primrose and Rick Edgecombe have done piles of HTML/Javascript coding.  Matt for the web application and Rick for getting us started with Node-Webkit and self-update system.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Our new messaging web application is available on a wide range of platforms.
From the main site, our web application and native node application.

When a messaging session is established between two users, the web application will
attempt to setup a WebRTC connection. If successful, messages flow directly between users.

In the past week or so, my co-workers and myself have been doing a lot of bug fixing and getting ready to release a bunch of new features. So, in general, working is moving along very well. I released a bunch of server updates yesterday on the info.meshcentral.com web site including a new version of the server installer.

We have noticed that the Mesh Agent installer for OSX Yosemite is broken, we are working on a fix now. Also, I did a bunch of fixes for ClickOnce support on Meshcentral.com and other Mesh servers and released that yesterday. ClickOnce allows you to launch RDP/VNC/Putty tools directly from the web site and have the connection routed thru the server.

We are also working on improving the Mesh Agent API's and may start getting more documentation and samples in the coming month. If you have an application running on a remote machine that has a mesh agent, the application can communicate with the agent and do a bunch of interesting things. I want to work on getting this API more known and used. Great for Internet-of-things usages, etc. So, more on that coming up.

Ylian
info.meshcentral.com

People already familiar with Meshcentral know we are making the most of web technologies and getting the benefits associated with this strategy. We make extensive use of WebRTC as a way to connect browsers to devices and other browsers for a wide range of usages. Today, we are releasing another part of this vision, our very own WebRTC TURN server built-into Meshcentral.com and all Mesh servers. This new component developed by Bryan Roe makes it easy for Mesh server administrators to offer all of the WebRTC services to all users, regardless of network connection situation.

Let’s back up and explain this a bit. WebRTC is a UDP peer-to-peer protocol that is built into Chrome/Firefox/Opera browsers. In most cases, it can be used to directly and securely connect two endpoints without going thru a server. It’s very useful for messaging, remote desktop, file transfers, video support and much more. Sometimes however, network proxies or some NAT routers don’t allow UDP traffic between peers and WebRTC connection fails. To fix this, WebRTC can optionally use a TURN server as relay for the UDP traffic. In the last year, we had Meshcentral support for another open source TURN server that was difficult to install. You needed a separate Linux machine and configure everything just right.

Today, we are releasing our own Mesh WebRTC TURN server. It’s automatically installed and configured with any Mesh Server and just works out of the box. It’s feature rich and fully remotely manageable and upgradable because it’s built to work with Platform Manager, the Meshcentral server management tool. All this, makes is easier than ever to use Meshcentral to get things done. You don’t need to understand the details, you just setup a Meshcentral server and it all just works.

A few minutes ago, I interviewed Bryan Roe, the author of the Mesh Relay Server. We talked about what it is, how it works and some of the special features. Check out the YouTube video.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Check out my interview with Bryan Roe, the author of the Mesh Relay Server
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXUwXDPKMKM

TURN servers are needed in cases where WebRTC can’t establish a direct UDP connection.
By having a TURN server available, connections always work regardless of network setup.

The new Mesh Relay Server is packed with features. Best of all, it now comes built-in with
Meshcentral servers and is fully remote manageable and updatable.

This week, we have a many updates and bug fixes to Meshcentral. Under the covers we made significant bug fixes, including to some fixes to quite high priority bugs. Thank you to everyone that keeps submitting feedback and bug reports, it’s very much appreciated. In this mail we will cover three major improvements:

• Apple OSX Yosemite support. We have had OSX support for a long time with Mesh, but it’s never been that great. Also, with Yosemite, the Mesh Agent installation broke completely. Bryan Roe took a few days and made some much needed improvements to the installer and we now have support for all OSX operating systems starting with 10.6 (Snow Leopard) all the way to 10.10 (Yosemite). Bryan also fixed the installer so that remote desktop now works without having to reboot the computer after first install. Makes the user experience around OSX much better than before.
• Meshcentral dynamic devices page. Probably the most used page on Meshcentral is the devices page. This week, we built a completely new version of the page with this same look, but vastly different inner workings. The old page did not handle large numbers of devices well and made it hard to quickly find the device you want. The new page does away with the devices pages replacing it with a scrollable window and a new super-fast device data unpacking system that minimizes the about of data the server has to send and allows the page to dynamically search, sort and filter without going back to the server. People with many devices will likely love the new page.
• Mesh Agent v1.90. We released a new Mesh Agent v1.90 with many more bug fixes for pretty much all architectures and operating systems supported. It has improved handling for HTTP proxies on windows, change for the Yosemite installer and most importantly, a new application registration notification system. Starting with this agent, when a Mesh aware application registers with the Mesh Agent, the Mesh Server gets notified. The server stored this data in the Mesh server database and we can now start tailoring the web site and web applications with added features depending on what is running on the remote machine. Look forward to many uses of this feature going forward.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Updated OSX Mesh Agent installer now works on OSX Yosemite.
The mesh agent will run from OSX 10.6 to 10.10.

The updated Meshcentral devices pages loads faster and has fully dynamic search, filtering and sorting feature.

The latest Mesh Agent v1.90 just got released with many bug fixes and a new system to
inform the Mesh Server of all registered mesh aware applications.

(This blog is only for people that run their own Mesh Server, everyone else can ignore)

For people that have setup their very own Meshcentral server, you have the option to get automatic updates so that, as new server features come out, you get them deployed automatically. Lots of improvements are being done everyday and it's nice to have your very own server being updated from time to time. Your Mesh server should have the "My Friends" tab when you are logged in. If you don't, it's a good hint your not getting updates. In this blog, I want to take a look at configuring your Mesh server for automatic update. People that have setup their server a while ago may not be getting updates and so, should read this.

To know if you are getting Mesh Server updates, look at this text file: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Open Source\Platform Manager\Platform Manager Server\settings.txt” and find this line:

   #relay=info.meshcentral.com:51235,qmdwiodernzxcc32047084t6kask

If there is a "#" in front of this line, you are NOT getting auto-updates. Edit the file and remove the "#" character. After 10 seconds, the Platform Manager Service should notice the change, connect to info.meshcentral.com and start updating the server. That should do it.

In very extreme cases: Check back in 10 minutes. If the server is not updated, check the file again. If the "#" have been placed back in the settings.txt file, you have a bad version of the Mesh Server Installer. Download a new version here and drag & drop it in the "Runtime" panel of you Platform Manager. Remote the "#" again in the setting.txt and now, the auto-update setting should stick.

Enjoy!
Ylian
info.meshcentral.com

It’s full speed ahead for Meshcentral as we start the holiday season. This week we for another stack of big improvements that continue to drive Meshcentral as a leading solution for open source computer monitoring and management.

• WebRTC file transfers. For a long time, we could manage and transfer files to any Mesh computer. This has been a wonderful feature for being able to access your remote computers and devices and used for anything from getting school work and pushing patches. For a long time, we have had WebRTC support for the control channel of the file feature, but file upload and downloads would still be relayed thru the server. This week, we improved the software so that file transfers are done over WebRTC. As a result, file transfers are faster and Mesh servers deal with a lot less traffic.
• Twitter integration. The Mesh Social Server is making a comeback this week. Ages ago, Meshcentral had Twitter integration, but it was dropped when Twitter changed its API’s. This week, we have a new and improved server with updated Twitter API and an updated Meshcentral Twitter page. It’s still work in progress, but users of Meshcentral.com can now associate their Twitter account once again.
• Improved Mobile Site. Meshcentral’s web site as had a mobile version of the site for a long time, but it was not well known and poorly supported. This week, we completely ditched the old mobile site and replaced it with the Meshcentral mobile application. This is the same code base that run the MeshCommunicator application, the “My Friends” tab and other links. We also fully integrated the mobile site so your don’t have to login again if already logged into the desktop site, and you can easily switch from one to the other.
• Mobile App Remote Files. This week, we also added remote file access to the Meshcentral web application. This new feature joins remote desktop and remote terminal and makes the Meshcentral web application a quite powerful application for remote management from phones and tablets. Just hit the new “Mobile Site” link on the bottom right of the web site.

I could go on, we have countless improvements made by user requests. For example: improved MeshCommand.exe so it can work on any mesh server automatically, improved Intel AMT activation from the cloud, improved mesh agent with local management configuration, fixes for Windows Domain authentication and much more. Many thanks to people who report bugs and help me fix them.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Meshcentral now features WebRTC file transfers. You can now upload and download files from any
Mesh computer without the file having to be relayed thru the Mesh server.

Twitter integration to Meshcentral is making a comeback.
Meshcentral’s Twitter page has been much improved (meshcentral.com only).
Check out the new Meshcentral Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/meshcentral

The all new Meshcentral mobile web site is now fully integrated into the Meshcentral main site.
The improved mobile with new has remote file support.

Today, we are officially announcing Meshcentral the latest feature… Meshcentral holiday gingerbread cookies! They come with many features:

• Gingerbread. Made from gingerbread … because that is super important.
• Personalized. Features the Meshcentral team.
• Frosting. Adds all the color!

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

This week we have a bit of a surprise. Rick Edgecombe is on sabbatical now and has been for over a month, this said, this work and impact continue to be felt and today is no exception. Rick is responsible for Meshcentral’s remote video support feature on Android and ChromeOS. To date, we had this feature on only two operating systems: Android and ChromeOS. This is no longer the case, we are now announcing Meshcentral remote video support for Windows, Linux and OSX! This means that you can use Meshcentral for remote video support on pretty much any major operating system.

Now for the details: To make this work, you need to Install both the Mesh Agent and Mesh Communicator on your computer. Mesh Communicator is our NodeWebkit application for user-to-user messaging and device management. If you have Mesh Communicator running on your computer, even if it’s not logged in, the Mesh Agent v1.90 will detect its presence and make the video option show up on the server side. Your browser, Meshcentral, the Mesh agent and Mesh Communicator will coordinate to launch a WebRTC one-way video and two way audio session. More improvements and fixes are going to be made, but the team is very excited with the new possibilities.

This week, I would also like to put the spotlight on Bill York who has been an outstanding help in testing Meshcentral with a focus on management for the enterprise. In the past six months, Bill has setup his own public Meshcentral instance and helped us debug various issues. He is one of the very few to have purchased a paid Intel AMT activation certificate and loaded it within his own Meshcentral server to activate Intel AMT to admin mode directly. He also has a wide range of Intel® vPro, Android and IoT devices on his network. There is still much work to be done to have Meshcentral be enterprise ready, but thanks to Bill’s enthusiasm, we get there faster.

Lastly, SSL/TLS security has made the news again in the last few days. I want to note that we keep on top of this. Meshcentral.com is getting a full “A” score at ssllabs.com, the SSL/TLS security audit site. We made sure to patch and configure the server properly for best security including disabling SSL3/RC4 and enabling perfect forward secrecy.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

In addition to Android and ChromeOS, Meshcentral now has remote video help on Windows, OSX and Linux. We use Meshcentral, the Mesh Agent along with Mesh Communicator to setup a WebRTC video help session. Many thanks for Rick Edgecombe who continues to impact Intel while on sabbatical.

Bill York has his very own Meshcentral instance with an impressive list of devices connected to it.
With a focus on the enterprise, Bill tests Meshcentral with Intel® AMT, Android and IoT devices.

With recent news on SSL and TLS, we are staying on top of things with Meshcentral.com getting a full “A” score on the ssllabs.com test.

Everyone following the mesh work knows we are quite bullish on WebRTC. It’s the underlying framework we use for secure, scalable, user-to-user and user-to-machine communications. It has many wonderful benefits, my favorite being that it’s built into browsers. Generally, WebRTC is used only for browser-to-browser communication because support is non-existent for native applications. Early this year, we built our very own WebRTC data stack to address this exact problem, adding WebRTC support to the Mesh Agent and so, using the protocol as a scalable way to do remote management.

Today, as a result of the work of Bryan Roe. We are making our C/C++ WebRTC data stack freely available to developers with C# bindings and a fully working sample. Our WebRTC stack has been freely available for a long time, but we now packaged it up so developers can easily include it within their projects. It takes only a few minutes to download our WebRTC Microstack and get a C# application talking to a browser page. You can also use our stack for application-to-application communication, it supports STUN and TURN and is easy to use.

If you are building internet applications, mobile apps that connect back to the home, scalable IoT usages... There is no excuse not to use WebRTC as the communication protocol. Having both native and browser applications communicate using a single, scalable and secure framework is a powerful story.

Download the stack, sample and documentation here: http://opentools.homeip.net/webrtc

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

With our native C/C++ WebRTC application stack with C# bindings, we are enabling WebRTC to be
a complete communication framework between web and native applications.

Included is a sample C# application is a tiny HTTP server. You push a button to launch a browser,
it loads a sample html page and a few seconds later, you have a WebRTC connection between C# and Javascript.

Built on top of Microstack, the same framework used by Meshcentral, our WebRTC stack is very small.
Almost all the size of the WebRTC stack is the latest OpenSSL that we statically link into our dll.
Our stack will compile on Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, Yocto and more…

It’s a new year and lots is going on with Meshcentral. We have been hard at work and have lots to announce. First, I am very happy that Rick Edgecombe is back from sabbatical this week, the core Mesh team (Rick, Bryan, Kevin and myself) are all back and working. This week’s announcements are very geeky, targeted at advanced Mesh users. It especially impacts Intel AMT, Linux and IoT usages:

• Mesh Agent v1.92 with Mesh Command. The latest Mesh Agent executable has two personalities, it’s both the “mesh agent” and “mesh command” depending on how it’s invoked. On Linux you can create a symbolic link from “meshcmd” to the mesh agent binary, then when you type “meshcmd” to have access to a command line tool that offers may mesh operations. For example you can remotely wake or sleep computers, enumerate devices and more. By having Mesh Command built into the agent, it will continue to be automatically updated and is now available on most platforms where Mesh is supported. This new tool opens up many new possibilities moving forward.
  • MeshCmd now includes Intel® ME information tool. If you type “MeshCmd MEINFO” or “MeshCmd MEHASHES” you can get activation information and provisioning state about Intel AMT. In effect, we built a version of the “meinfo” windows tool into the Mesh Agent and are porting it to all platforms.
  • MeshCmd has standalone Intel® AMT LMS. You can also type “MeshCmd MELMS” and launch standalone LMS. The agent’s built-in LMS is run automatically when the Mesh Agent launches, but we are offering administrators the options to launch LMS standalone. This is especially useful on Linux, XEN and other platforms where LMS is not generally available. Download the mesh agent, rename it to “meshcmd” and launch LMS. That simple.
• Mesh Agent API package. We just released an all new Mesh Agent API and samples package on info.meshcentral.com. This pack has C/C#/Java samples for applications that want to interact directly with the mesh agent to perform application data storage and mesh messaging. This has been required a lot in the past and is especially useful for IoT usages.
• Update on latest OpenSSL. A few days back, 8 more OpenSSL vulnerabilities have been found with medium severity level, OpenSSL 1.0.1l was released. Mesh Agent 1.92 includes all the latest OpenSSL updates and fixes.
• Mesh Server reduced idle chatter. The latest Mesh Server now has reduced idle chatter to all Mesh Agents. This is especially important to devices on cellphone links. We implemented a 16x or more reduction in traffic when the devices are doing nothing. In addition, we implemented a new traffic audit feature in the mesh server to help administrators and developers see exactly what traffic is being send to and from agents. This will help reduce traffic even more in the future.

These are just some of the changes, for a live blow-by-blow of what is going on, follow Meshcentral on Twitter.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Rick Edgecombe is back from sabbatical and we offered him his old desk as a gift.
Looks like he is ready to go on the latest feature!

The new Mesh Agent on Windows and Linux has two personalities, depending on how you launch it,
it behaves like the Mesh Agent, or MeshCmd… the new Mesh command line tool.

MeshCmd allows the administrator to do all sorts of interesting actions from the command line: Get Agent information, list managed meshes and nodes with power state, get Intel AMT state and start a Micro version of Intel® AMT LMS. More features will be added as new agents are released…

It’s been a busy week for the Mesh team with Rick Edgecombe releasing software and taking care of important customers, Bryan Roe working on Intel’s very own WebRTC stack, Kevin Wang making his first software release and ramping up on Mesh Communicator. This week, we have a bunch of new releases:

• Live Mesh Statistics. We now have a new live statistics page on Mesh servers. It shows how many mesh agents, consoles and Intel® AMT CIRA connections are active in near real-time. Kevin Wang is the author and the page is publically available to view. Login to Meshcentral.com, go in “My Account” tab and hit the “Live” link. If you are a customer of mesh and run your own mesh server, probably a good idea to put this real-time screen next to your management’s cube.
• Updated WebRTC native data stack v0.2. Intel’s own WebRTC data stack has been updated on the open source site. The latest stack has many bug fixes and a fully working C sample that you can compile on almost any platform. Bryan Roe has been hard at work on this and is already working on the next release. This code is central to enabling many new usages with browsers and native code interact with each other in a scalable way, opening up many more possibilities for web applications.
• Mesh Agent API pack now with Node.js code. A few weeks back we released a new Agent API pack that allows applications to interact with a Mesh Agent running on the local computer. We already have code for C, C# and Java. This week Rick Edgecombe added Node.JS support. You can, for example, use this to have a NodeWebkit application communicate with the mesh agent to perform discovery, messaging and other usages.
• Mesh Agent v1.92 with latest OpenSSL. We got the latest OpenSSL with all DTLS fixes released on all platforms, including release on OSX. This solves WebRTC related security issues. The team is staying on top of the latest security issues and updating the software accordingly.

These are just some of the changes, we are releasing updates almost daily. For a live blow-by-blow of what is going on, follow Meshcentral on Twitter.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Standing next to the new Mesh live statistics page built by Kevin Wang,
the Meshcentral team taking a 30 second break from coding for the picture.

Bryan Roe released the latest WebRTC native data stack v0.2 on opentools.homeip.net.
The latest stack is much improved and includes a fully working C sample that can
compile on Windows, Linux, OSX and more.

Rick Edgecombe added the first version of Node.js support in the Mesh Agent API pack.
This pack allows developers to write applications that communicate with the mesh agent.

It’s always a good time when the Meshcentral team releases new and amazing features. This week is another one of these times with the Rick Edgecombe building and releasing Meshcentral’s MeshCast. A way to remotely share your webcam or desktop to a remote display over the Internet. With this new feature, you can go to the login screen of Meshcentral and hit the remote display icon. You then instantly have a remote display you can access using an on-screen rotating access code. After you have your remote display setup, using a different device to login to Meshcentral. Go in “My Friends” tab and hit the “Control Remote Display” icon. Enter the code and start sharing.

WebRTC browsers like Firefox and Chrome can share audio & video using WebRTC, but for Remote Desktop, Rick Edgecombe built a new MeshCast Chrome Browser Extension that allows users to share their full desktop displays or just one application on the desktop. Meshcentral will detect and prompt for the installation of this Chrome Extension and it’s built so other Mesh Servers can take advantage of it.

Meshcentral’s MeshCast is a powerful new way to share media streams between locations. Probably it’s best features is that it’s entirely web based and uses the powerful WebRTC protocol for over-the-internet connectivity. There are plenty of usages. From user-to-use teleconferences, to education and remote assist. With this feature, Meshcentral continue to move forward with web based development of WebRTC usages. In addition, MeshCast uses a new signaling system we added to Meshcentral servers a few weeks back. What is interesting here is that we released the new access code signaling system as part of our API and in the HTML Samples package. So not only did we enable MeshCast, developers can add new custom usages with the same signaling system. Want to use an rotating access code to securely access an IoT device? You can do that with Meshcentral.

We got more, but we will keep that for another mail. For a live blow-by-blow of what is going on, follow Meshcentral on Twitter.

Questions and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
info.meshcentral.com

Starting with two browsers, you can quickly setup a remote display and use Meshcentral
to share a webcam or remote desktop using the access code.

The new Google Chrome browser extension for MeshCentral MeshCast allows
users to share their full desktop or select one application to share.